Perceiving commitments: When we both know that you are counting on me

Abstract

Funding information Central European University ERC Starting, Grant/Award Number: 679092; SENSE OF COMMITMENT ERC Synergy, Grant/Award Number: 609819, SOMICS Can commitments be generated without promises or gestures conventionally interpreted as such? We hypothesized that people believe that commitments are in place when one agent has led a recipient to rely on her to do something, even without a commissive speech act or any action conventionalized as such, and this is mutual knowledge. To probe this, we presented participants with online vignettes describing everyday situations in which a recipient's expectations were frustrated by one's behavior. Our results show that moral judgments differed significantly according to whether the recipient's reliance was mutually known, irrespective of whether this was verbally acknowledged.